The best stories of Sarah Orne Jewett, Volume 1 (of 2) — Text and Context

Cather's Preface and Jewett's Own Words

Willa Cather's preface is itself a document of literary judgment. She reproduces a line from Jewett's letters: "The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper—whether little or great, it belongs to Literature." This definition emphasizes persistence and recurrence over plot or novelty. Cather does not claim to know Jewett's intentions; she instead points to a process of composition that the stories themselves exemplify. The preface also includes a tribute by Charles Miner Thompson, who compares Jewett's art to trailing arbutus—"fragrant, retiring, exquisite"—and calls it a symbol of New England virtue. Together, these framing materials suggest that the volume was conceived as a literary, not a genre, collection.

The Dunnet Landing Sequence: Community and Landscape

The bulk of the volume is taken up by the linked stories set in Dunnet Landing, a fictional coastal village. The excerpts show a world organized by kinship and memory. In one passage, Mrs. Todd and her mother, Mrs. Blackett, drive to a Bowden family reunion, and the narrative voice shifts between their dialogue and descriptive commentary. Mrs. Todd observes that "there's nothing takes in this whole neighborhood like anything related to the Bowdens," and the old Bowden house is described as "a motherly brown hen waiting for the flock." The landscape is not backdrop but active presence: boats drop sail in the cove, footpaths converge from along shore and across country. The reunion scene includes a comic anecdote about a scatter-witted girl and a baby in a fit, told by Mrs. Blackett with evident pleasure. These details ground the stories in specific social rituals and oral tradition.

Voice and the Limits of the Excerpts

The excerpts reveal Jewett's characteristic use of dialect and indirect narration, but they do not provide a complete story arc. The reader encounters fragments of the Dunnet Landing sequence—the reunion, the journey, the talk of fits and catnip—without the earlier chapters that establish characters like Captain Littlepage or Poor Joanna. The catalog subject "Science Fiction & Utopias" finds no support in these passages, which are firmly rooted in observable, contemporary life. The volume's word count (nearly 69,000 words) and twenty-eight text sections suggest a substantial collection, but the excerpts offer only a partial view. Any inference about the whole must be cautious: the stories likely continue in the same mode of regional realism, but the resolution of individual narratives remains unknown.

Readers approaching this volume should set aside the catalog's genre label and attend instead to the texture of Jewett's prose—the way she renders speech, the weight she gives to place, and the unhurried accumulation of detail. Cather's preface provides a useful lens: these are stories that earned their form through long contemplation. The Dunnet Landing sequence rewards patient reading, and the volume as a whole offers a concentrated sample of Jewett's work as curated by a major American novelist.